Howie_Lempel

• Howie_LempelJul 8, 2025, 6:41 PM

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: escapealert’s comment on: es­capeal­ert’s Quick takes

  Hey! You might be interested in this forum post on suicide hotlines from a while back. https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​Xh5oyGkngGjCmNhcP/​​how-impactful-is-being-a-suicide-hotline-volunteer

  Unfortunately, I think the comments in the post (including one from a former volunteer) make a really compelling case that it takes a lot more than 5 hours to prevent a suicide. I think it takes at least hundreds and probably thousands of hours of calls.

• Howie_LempelMay 3, 2025, 5:56 PM

  16 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jason’s comment on: calebp’s Shortform

  “People who don’t like being criticized are often going to be open about that fact”

  [Just responding to this narrow point and not the comment as a whole, which contains plenty of things I agree with.]

  Fwiw, I don’t think this is true in this community. Disliking criticism is a bad look and seeming responsive to criticism is highly valued. I’ve seen lots of situations up close where it would have been very aversive/​costly for someone to say “I totally disagree with this criticism and think it wasn’t useful” and very tempting for someone to express lots of gratitude for criticism and change in response to it whether or not it was right. I think it’s not uncommon for the former to take more bravery than the latter and I personally feel unsure whether I’ve felt more bias towards agreeing with criticism that was wrong or disagreeing with criticism that was right.

• Howie_LempelApr 6, 2025, 12:02 AM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ben_West🔸’s comment on: An­thropic is not be­ing con­sis­tently can­did about their con­nec­tion to EA

  Agree with Ben that this makes it harder to find folks for leadership positions.

  In addition to excluding shy awkward nerds, you’re also actively selecting for a bunch of personality traits, not all of which are unalloyed positives.

  By analogy, I think there’s a very strong argument that very high levels of scrutiny are fair game for politicians but I’m not particularly thrilled with what that does to our candidate pool.

  (I don’t know of a great way to resolve this tension.)

• Howie_LempelMar 29, 2025, 9:49 PM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Third-wave AI safety needs so­ciopoli­ti­cal thinking

  Anybody else in addition to Fukuyama, Friedman, and Cummings who you think is good at doing the kind of thinking you’re pointing to here?

  Are there alternatives to your two factor model that seem particularly plausible to you?

• Howie_LempelDec 31, 2023, 1:31 AM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: An­nounc­ing In­terim CEOs of EVF

  No worries! It takes a couple clicks to get there.

• Howie_LempelDec 30, 2023, 7:59 PM

  11 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: An­nounc­ing In­terim CEOs of EVF

  Hey Larks,

  [For transparency—I no longer work at EV.]

  Yep—this was followed up on. Here are links to the pages for EV UK and EV US.

An­nounc­ing Rob Gled­hill as the new CEO of EV UK

• Howie_LempelJul 25, 2023, 4:05 PM

  33 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: lincolnq’s comment on: Why have CEA /​ Effec­tive Ven­tures Foun­da­tion not filed ac­counts for 2022?

  This is correct. We ended up needing to resolve a couple issues related to the inquiry before we can file. We’ve stayed in touch with the Charity Commission about the delay.

• Howie_LempelJul 20, 2023, 11:43 AM

  15 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Howie_Lempel’s comment on: An EA’s Guide to Visit­ing New York City

  Additional restaurants I’d recommend:

  • Buddha Bodai (Chinatown) has my favorite vegetarian Chinese food.

    • The non-vegetarian colleagues I introduced it to ended up ordering lunch there once/​week for months.

    • When I was in college, it was one of two restaurants that helped convince me I could survive as a vegetarian. (RIP Williamsburg’s Foodswings, which had the world’s best vegan buffalo wings).

  • Red Bamboo (Washington Square Park) has great vegan bbq wings and chicken.

• Howie_LempelJul 20, 2023, 11:29 AM

  14 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: An EA’s Guide to Visit­ing New York City

  I wanted to make some additional non-EA recommendations but don’t want to blow up the comments section with non-EA stuff, so here’s a thread for people to do that.

• Howie_LempelJul 8, 2023, 6:45 AM

  78 points

  30 ∶ 0

  on: Some Ob­ser­va­tions on Alcoholism

  Thanks for sharing. I think it was brave and I appreciated getting to read this. I’m sorry you’ve had to go through this and am glad to hear you’re feeling optimistic.

• Howie_LempelJun 30, 2023, 11:45 AM

  11 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Agnes Stenlund’s comment on: agnesten­lund’s Quick takes

  This seems like an improvement to me. Thanks!

  Feedback on a minor pain point for me. When I’m looking at quick takes on the front page and want to go to the permalink for the relevant take (e.g. to see all the discussion under it), I often look around for a big title to click on for a while before remembering that I’m supposed to click on the icon on the top right, which is small, doesn’t stand out much, and feels too me like it’s somehow violating an implicit expectation I have for where to find this for this kind of content.

  I have no clue whether this is just me, whether this is worth addressing, or what a good solution would be. (It does make sense to me that quick takes don’t have big titles like a normal top level post would.)

  What links here?

  • quinn's comment on Open Thread: July—Septem­ber 2023 by Lizka (Jul 6, 2023, 10:52 AM; 5 points)

• Howie_LempelJun 27, 2023, 2:28 PM

  35 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ubuntu’s comment on: EA’s suc­cess no one cares about

  Probably the best thing I got out of two years in law school. . .

• Howie_LempelJun 25, 2023, 1:44 PM

  19 points

  5 ∶ 0

  on: US pub­lic per­cep­tion of CAIS state­ment and the risk of extinction

  I’d wondered about this. Doing this survey seems like a really useful contribution. Thanks!

• Howie_LempelJun 25, 2023, 1:43 PM

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Down­sides of Small Or­ga­ni­za­tions in EA

  I think this was a cool post and I’m excited to see this kind of discussion here. (I think it misses a bunch of advantages of small orgs but seems fine to have a post that’s mostly about the disadvantages. unfortunately don’t have time to write out my object level thoughts here—just wanted to be clear that this comment is a “like” not a “(fully) agree.” )

• Howie_LempelJun 25, 2023, 1:34 PM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jeff Kaufman 🔸’s comment on: The flow of fund­ing in EA move­ment building

  what percent of Google SWEs hit $500k?

• Howie_LempelJun 23, 2023, 12:33 PM

  24 points

  7 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ubuntu’s comment on: Four claims about the role of effec­tive giv­ing in the EA community

  I wonder if Jack would be equally happy with the weaker claim that giving 10% is not advisable for the median American in their twenties. I’m not sure whether I’d agree even with that but wm it seems more plausible to me than claiming it’s not feasible.

Lin­coln Quirk has joined the EV UK board

• Howie_LempelMay 29, 2023, 10:55 AM

  88 points

  4 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Bob Jacobs’s comment on: Bob Ja­cobs’s Shortform

  Hey Bob—Howie from EV UK here. Thanks for flagging this! I definitely see why this would look concerning so I just wanted to quickly chime in and let you/​others know that we’ve already gotten in touch with relevant regulators about this and I don’t think there’s much to worry about here.

  The thing going on is that EV UK has an extended filing deadline (from 30 April to 30 June 2023) for our audited accounts,^[1] which are one of the things included in our Annual Return. So back in April, we notified the Charity Commission that we’ll be filing our Annual Return by 30 June.

  1. ^

     This is due to a covid extension, which the UK government has granted to many companies.

  What links here?

  • Jason's comment on Why have CEA /​ Effec­tive Ven­tures Foun­da­tion not filed ac­counts for 2022? by iamnotalawyer (Jul 25, 2023, 12:32 PM; 19 points)

• Howie_LempelMay 10, 2023, 3:20 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: JP Addison🔸’s comment on: JP’s Shortform

  [Only a weak recommendation.] I last looked at this >5 years ago and never read the whole thing. But FYI that Katja Grace wrote a case study on the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, which established a bunch of voluntary guidelines that have been influential in biotech. Includes analogy to AI safety. (No need to pay me.) https://​intelligence.org/​files/​TheAsilomarConference.pdf